Northwest and the Arctic

This is a largely roadless region of long, dark, sunless winters and short, bright summers, when the sun provides nearly three months of perpetual daylight in places like Barrow. The round-the-clock sunshine lasts for only a few days farther south, but the extended twilight hours turn the midnights bright. It's the land of Eskimos and huge caribou herds and polar bears, a place where people still lead subsistence lifestyles and where the Native cultural traditions live on. It's also a place of gold rushes past and America's largest oil field, as well as a region with many of Alaska's most remote parklands—not to mention one of the country's grandest refuges, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.